If the Nobel committee wants to reward an economist whose work has shed light on contemporary events, it could opt for Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard economist who did a stint at the International Monetary Fund. Rogoff, with co-author Carmen Reinhart, published the seminal study into debt crises, This Time is Different, which brought together evidence on 800 years of crashes and crunches. They found, among other things, that once a country reaches a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 90%, there's trouble brewing — an insight borne out recently by the experience of Greece, among others.

Rumours in academic circles have suggested that Angus Deaton, a Brit based at Princeton, and Sir Tony Atkinson, of Nuffield College, Oxford, may be in the frame, for their work on inequality. Atkinson has been carrying out painstaking work into who earns and owns what in Britain, what that means, and what can be done about it, since the 1970s. Separately, Deaton uses survey evidence to examine the link between income, health and wellbeing around the world. Studying the (widening) gap between rich and poor was a relatively unfashionable corner of economics for many years. But income distribution has recently come to be seen - by the OECD and the IMF - as a bar to economic recovery, and perhaps even a cause of the crisis.

Yale's Robert Shiller, one of the few economists who can claim to have foreseen both the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the US housing crash – predicted in his book Irrational Exuberance – is also frequently mentioned. Unlike many ivory tower economists, Shiller has turned some of his theories into cash, designing a house-price index with colleague Karl Case. The widely cited Case-Shiller index, which uses repeat sales of the same properties to track price changes, was snapped up by ratings agency Standard and Poor's. Shiller is regularly quoted as an expert on the housing market, which he believes still hasn't bottomed out. His most recent book, Finance and the Good Society, is about the benefits of financial innovation - a tough message to sell in the current climate.